6 Young People Aged 17-28 Explain The Devastating Reason That Facebook Had To Buy Instagram

Ben Schachter at Macquarie has a fascinating research note out titled: Facebook's annoying features drive users to Instagram.

He held a panel of 6 people aged 17-28 to track their social media behavior.

What he found is a huge exodus of usage from Facebook to Instagram (which of course Facebook acquired).

Here are Schachter's key takeaways:

Obviously, this was only a small group and certainly not a statistically relevant survey, but still we thought there were some interesting takeaways, including

- All of the participants are now actively using Instagram (none were a year ago)

- Facebook still plays a large role, but mostly because it aggregates all their social connections in one place.

- They universally did not like the new timeline on Facebook

- Nearly all said that they expect to use Facebook less six months from now versus today.

- The twenty-somethings indicated that 25% or fewer of their social friends were using Instagram, but the teens indicated that virtually all of their friends were already using it.

- They stated that Instagram is more intimate and that they use it to sort of “start over” versus cleaning up the long list of “friends” on Facebook

- Instragram seems to be used more by females. One participant added, “most boys are not uploading pictures of flowers”

Notably, one participant said, "If I got rid of my Facebook, I would not be out of the loop with my friends as long as I'm on Instagram".

The rest of the report is devastating in terms of what the panelists said about Facebook ("creepy", "boring", "cluttered," "annoying")

The saving grace for the company is that it's still a necessary place to hang out, because it aggregates everything else, and people use their real names. But Instagram is eating its lunch, and though Facebook owns both, the question of whether it will be monetizable on remotely the same scale as the web is highly in doubt.